Title: Flowers in the Attic
Author: V. C. Andrews
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 384
Rating: 3/5
Before I picked this one up, I’d heard a lot of good things about it to the point at which I was excited to get to it. In fact, someone had only just talked to me about it when I saw it in a charity shop, so it became a no-brainer. And what I will say is that I loved the concept. I just don’t know if I liked the execution.
Part of that might actually be due to the fact that I listened to the audio book, because it wasn’t a very good one and the narrator’s voice grated on me, to the point at which when bad things happened to the characters, I was glad of it. That probably says more about me as a person than about the book, though.
I think a lot of that is because it’s a slow burner and so the story took a while to develop. You can tell where it’s going pretty quickly, but it takes a long time to get there. It’s like walking along a long, boring road with nothing to look at, and so by the time you finally arrive at the destination, you’ve forgotten why you were going there in the first place.
It’s one of those books where I can see why other people like it but it just didn’t quite do it for me, and I definitely won’t be continuing with the series any time soon. The characters didn’t grab me enough, and in fact they didn’t grab me at all. Like I said, I was actively hoping for bad things to happen to them so that it would lessen the monotony, and then I was glad when it did.
In the introduction, the author talked about how you need light to illuminate darkness and how she tried to put her characters in the dark and to occasionally bring them into the light to give people some hope of a better future. For me, the darkness wasn’t as dark as I might have liked it to be, and the light just felt tedious and gratuitous. But hey, perhaps that’s just me. I don’t know.
